In the weeds

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, recaps the latest Dirt Discord discourse, ft. a gardening channel, more SPF recs, design favorites, and cinema’s premium mediocre summer.

MORE DISCORD, LESS DISCOURSE

🥕🌿 By popular demand, we’ve added a #gardening channel, accessible to all Dirt readers who want plant care and gardening tips. @eurotrashnepobaby says buying a planter and soil for herbs was the “best $12 [she’s] ever spent.” Gardening tip from herb enthusiast @enicole: “Keep snipping herbs and using them so they don’t get too old or send flowers up.” If you, like me, don’t have access to consistent sunlight or an outdoor space conducive to gardening or are simply too lazy, keep supermarket herbs fresh in an airtight container, filled halfway with fresh water.

☀️ Our Good SPF recs kicked off some conversation on #daily-dirt with more sun recs. @lordfakon brought up Poolsuite’s Vacation sunscreen as an option with a disclaimer: “I have seriously terrible skincare credentials but I think it smells good and the one time I used it I thought it felt good. But am I just a sucker for branding? Is that all it is?” @spacificcoast says that Vacation is “completely serviceable but definitely not better than any other product mentioned on the list by far,” in that it’s “quite thick and takes a while to rub in.” They recommend the Korean brand Skin Aqua, which is available on Amazon. There’s no white cast for any of the products, goes easy over moisturizer, and doesn’t pill. @jaimederringer says: “I love PCA Skin Moisturizer (SPF 30). I use it everyday on my face and I have really terrible skin/adult acne.” @bedgloom recommends the Biore Aqua Rich UV “which is lovely and so cheap,” priced at around $8 on Amazon.

🪑 I am in the midst of furnishing a new apartment, which means most of my free time is spent trawling LiveAuctioneers (Snake by Sami Reiss is the newsletter for interior design-heads), arguing with Facebook Marketplace sellers, and dreaming about finding the perfect, affordable Herman Miller sectional (if anyone has leads on a pair of red Chiclets, please let me know). I’ve been encountering a fair amount of knockoff Murano mushroom-ey lamps on Marketplace, but Osirene found these LumenX lamps on Instagram. @moundofvenus also got served these mushroom night lights with the IG ad copy: “Pee in the luminescent glow of a mushroom night light.” And for anyone looking to drop $200 on a 70s-era mushroom lamp, this Italian Etsy seller has some incredible Space Age fixtures.

BEACH READS 🏖️

• Rachel Syme profiles Sarah Jessica Parker (New Yorker)

• A remembrance for James Gandolfini on the 10-year anniversary of his untimely passing (Vanity Fair)

• Dan Sinykin on Cormac McCarthy’s unusual literary career and why it would be impossible today: His first five novels, published over two decades, earned him considerable critical respect but were commercial failures. (NYT)

• I was reminded of this John Jeremiah Sullivan feature in GQ, “Violence of the Lambs,” in light of this viral Atlantic piece, which was obviously published as Twitter-bait. Sullivan’s is a half-reported, half-fictional piece (you have to read it to get what I mean) on how animals are acting more feral and aggressive towards humans.

PLAYBACK

• It's premium mediocre blockbuster season! My roommate and I had a friend over this weekend to watch Fast X. I am not a Fast and Furious fan (do I look like one?) but I simply have to respect the utter disregard for narrative realism in these movies.

• The double feature of the summer (if you’re into that kind of stuff) is Barbie and Oppenheimer.

  • I’m not thinking too hard about Barbie. My friends and I are making plans to wear a lot of pink and arrive at the theaters solidly baked. In Dirt’s #streaming-channel, @spacificcoast makes a good point about how Barbie is emblematic of how the culture has “unwittingly shifted from MCU sequels and Disney live-action reboots to straight up toy/game IP movies (Super Mario Bros., Battleship, The Lego Movie, Dungeons & Dragons) without any sort of ‘fatigue’ discourse around them yet … People seem legitimately excited to discuss the Barbie movie month(s) before it comes out, and I think people are more annoyed at the sheer amount of discourse rather than the wider endemic that has propagated it (all mainstream movies are mostly awful because it's lowest common denominator narrative based on bland IP).”

• Ayo Edebiri of The Bear (and soon Bottoms) fame recommends watching old, not-available-for-streaming movies on YouTube or through the Internet Archive:

  • “If I can't find [a movie], or if it's $50, I'll straight up just see if it's avail to watch on Youtube or through the Internet Archive and a lot of times it is. The quality might not be great, but that's okay. It's important to not get what you want sometimes in life.”

• Films featuring AI are coming to Criterion next month…

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